Saturday night at Pacific Coliseum, a Korean skater, Lee Jung-Su, won the gold. But the chance at a sweep, and a shutout of the longtime American rival, Ohno, literally went by the boards.

In the final turn for the finish line, two other Koreans locked up, went down, crashed into the sideboards and opened the door. Two of Seattle's athletic finest blew through.

But no foul. No DQ. No e-bombing NBC.

Just short track. Just the passing of a torch.

"That's the name of the game," said Ohno, shrugging and smiling after another improbable outcome in the sport that he has dominated and elevated. "I skated hard, gave my all, and was a beneficiary tonight."

He was particularly juiced to gig Sports Illustrated. Saturday morning, he read the magazine's Olympics predictions issue that forecast an event sweep by the Koreans.

"All three, huh?" Ohno said playfully. "I wanted to make sure they know what happened."

Juicing him even more was that he shared the podium with his fellow skater from Federal Way, 19-year-old J.R. Celski. It was the first time since the skiing Mahre brothers of White Pass, Phil and Steve, finished 1-2 in the slalom in Sarajevo in 1984 that state athletes have been shared a podium in an individual sport.

The Salt Lake race in 2002, ungainly as it was, inspired Celski to give up the in-line skating world for ice. It probably helped too, that the 19-year-old Ohno won silver that same year in the 1000-meter race when he crawled across the finish line on his hands and knees after a collision not unlike the mayhem of Saturday night.

What's an impressionable boy not to like about going fast, then having things blow up?

In the flush of a medal in his first Olympic race -- and his first race since gashing his thigh in a freak track accident five months earlier -- Celski was so flabbergasted that he could hardly describe the events that led to his delirium.

"I'm still processing," he said after multiple questions about the race. "That race seems like a blur to me. It was crazy.

"I saw one person make a pass, and two people fall. It kind of shocked me I wound up with a medal."

Shock is, of course, a standard fixture of short track, the rough equivalent of those table-top electric football games back in the day that sent plastic players all over the board.

But the shock of following one's sports hero across the finish line at an Olympics has few athletic equivalents.

"It just goes to show you what happens when you dedicate your life to doing something well," Celski said of Ohno, who moments after the race lifted his buddy off the ice in celebration. "He's amazing."

While Celski had every reason to wonder about how he was going to fare -- "I definitely got jitters out," he said -- Ohno had accomplished so much in his career that he entered these Olympics free of the pressure to prove anything to anyone.

"This was as relaxed as I've ever been going into a race," he said. "In warm-ups, I saw so many Canadian, American and international faces in the crowd; celebrities, too.

"It seemed so easy to be closing my career circle here in Vancouver."

Because the sport is so haphazard, there's nothing about this outcome that says much of anything about the two individual races and the relay in which that Ohno and Celski are entered. But if they don't win, it won't be because they're uptight.

The only uptight people may be the Koreans, who witnessed the passing of the American sped-skating baton from one annoying tough Seattle guy to another.